"Race" is the most ubiquitous scientific concept that has no basis whatsoever in science. -- Atty. Francis L. Holland.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Americans Might Benefit from Successful Court Challenges to ObamaCare

President Obama has Given us a New Form of Buggery that all Americans Can Get Behind

Courts across the United States are being asked to consider whether ObamaCare is constitutional. I think it might actually be helpful for the US Supreme Court to determine that ObamaCare is unconstitutional because it compels people to pay for medical coverage that they do not want.

Here's my reasoning: There would be nothing unconstitutional about Obama and the US Congress making Medicaid, Medicare, the Veterans Administration hospitals and/or the US Public Health Service into universal access entitlement programs. That would be true health care reform.

I think it OUGHT to be legally unacceptable for Obama to compel Americans to pay money to medical insurance companies that are hardly any less incorrigibly greedy and callous than the banks and brokers who have turned the nation's mortgage market into utter chaos and contributed to a fall of the value of the dollar by 50% over the last seven years.

Insurance companies simply cannot be trusted to offer affordable health care, and President Obama himself cannot be trusted when he tries to compel us to trust medical insurance companies. (The same can be true of the Obamian supply-side economic fixes that always give more money to banks and other classes of corporations while stingily and callously letting individual American families lose their homes, live out of their cars be blown in the wind like US flags during a hurricane.)

It's quite obvious by now that President Obama sees the failure of the banks as a more serious problem than 10% unemployment (an official 15% among Blacks), and the highest rate of mortgage foreclosures that the nation's citizens have suffered since the Great Depression.

Even now, he is more concerned about the effects that a moratorium on foreclosures would have for banks and markets than he is about the effects that lawless and fraudulent systemic banking practices have had on the individual homeowner's ability to know which bank (or which set of mortgage bundlers) has the legal authority to file foreclosure actions against individual American families.

American right-wingers need not concern themselves that President Obama could be a socialist when, in fact, his supply-side policies are almost as stringent toward working people as were those of Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Reagan endeavored to remove every bit of safety-net that working Americans had, while Obama has passively sat by and watched as Americans lose every bit of safety that middle class Americans have. But, he's been there for the bankers, the automobile manufacturers, and has created a program with 40 million new obligatory consumers of often-worthless health care insurance.

I don't think I'll cry if Obama is not re-elected in 2012, although I would be very chagrined to see the US Congress turned over to the Republicans now, partly as a result of Obama's insanely unpopular legislative pizzas. (In Brazil they call massively unconscionable screw-ups and multi-party political train wrecks "pizza".)

I used to argue that Americans should prefer Democratic Party presidents because even if we don't care about what Republicans do within our borders, we should not be callous about the wars and suffering that Republican presidents and legislatures cause overseas. President Obama has taken that abstract political argument away from me.

President Obama is at war in Iraq; at war in Afghanistan; turning Pakistan into an Afghanistan at war; looking at military options with Iran; and even building 7 new military bases in Columbia as a staging area for an invasion of Venezuela. President Obama is just as warful as his Republican predecessors and considerably more warful than any Democratic Party president since President Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War.

And yet, the Vietnam war was officially limited on one country, which Obama's mental genius has been able to multiply six-fold while still calling himself a Democrat. No, admittedly Obama has not instituted a draft as President Johnson did, yet.

How am I supposed to argue that the US Government would be more bellicose under a Republican administration? Obama is bellicose in six foreign countries simultaneously. All he has to do now is start dropping white phosphorous on one of these battlefields and we can declare that we have a Republican foreign policy president elected by the Democratic Party.

Obamian health care is as welcomed as universal syphilis.

Back to the point of this screed. If the Supreme Court finds that it is unconstitutional to make individual Americans give their money to insurance companies, then the only alternative will be what most Americans wanted in the first place: a Public Option.

If utter defeat in the US Supreme Court comes soon enough, there might still be time in Obama's one-term presidency for the legislation and implementation of a national government-sponsored program of Public Option health care that will not be a huge Government privatization of a health care vacuum, and giveaway to greedy, venal and callous insurance companies.

Obama has not created more Government insurance. He has simply privatized the market for insurance for the 40 million people who capitalist medicine was previously ignoring.

Obama sees Americans being financially raped by the unhealthy grasp of insurance companies and what does he do? He says he believes it will be fairer if all of us are financially raped by medical insurers, so that some of us will not get financially raped twice or thrice while others of us are not raped at all. Thanks President Obama! You've given us a new national form of buggery that we can all get behind.

This is one instance where the conservatives on the US Supreme Court could create Public Option medical care by finding that privatization of obligatory medical insurance is an unconstitutional "taking."

It's time for Obama to let the Congress go back to the drawing board and give us a Public Option in the US that is at least as good as the one I now have in Brazil.